Introduction to RobMensching.com/blog
I toyed with the idea with hosting my own private blog a while ago but got real serious about it when I finally picked up the vanity domain http://RobMensching.com. I was keeping tabs on the Subtext project because of my work on the Internal blogs at Microsoft but when Subtext finally supported medium trust I figured it was ready to host my own blog. Finally, in November I pushed the huge reset button on life by changing jobs and getting married all at the same time. I figured I might as well reset my presence in the blogosphere.
For those of you that haven’t been following my blog for the last three years, let me provide some background about myself.
Graduated from University of Missouri - Rolla (UMR) with a Computer Science BS in 1999. There is a contingent of UMR graduates around here and we’re all really good friends. I remember seeing a documentary on the tight friendships formed between veterans from WWII and Vietnam. The documentary’s narrator speculated that those strong bonds were formed during moments of intense adversity. I think that explains why we’re such good friends.
Work for Microsoft Corporation as a software design engineer. During the winter semester of my Junior year at UMR and during that summer (1998) I was an intern on the Windows Installer team when it was still in Office. After graduating from university, I returned full time to the Office release and deployment team. Over the next seven years I would ship Office XP, Office 2003/Office Online, move to Windows Server to ship the System Definition Model in Visual Studio, and finally move to Windows Core to ship Windows Vista. For each of those teams I worked on the installation, or setup, of the software. I now work on the Windows Marketplace team building an electronic software distribution system for the Windows ecosystem.
Project lead for Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset since 1999. I created the WiX toolset to learn XML, which was a relatively new technology in 1999, by applying it to the Windows Installer. The result was a compiler, linker, and other tools that are used across Microsoft to create MSI databases from XML source code. In April 2004, the WiX toolset became the first Open Source project released by Microsoft. Today the WiX toolset is used by companies big and small around the world.
That’s good start. Stick around if you want to read more about topics such as software installation, Windows Installer specifics, WiX toolset events, Open Source at Microsoft and just day to day events in my life.
Welcome to /blog.